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Thursday, October 11, 2012

`Strong in His Cheerfulness'

Dr.
Johnson knew Oliver Edwards (1711-1791) from a distance at Pembroke College,
the way we know the harmlessly dull fellow down the hall in our dormitory.
After Oxford, Edwards practiced for many years as a solicitor in Barnard’s Inn,
and retired to live on a sixty-acre farm near Stevenage in Hertfordshire. What
little we know of Edwards suggests he was a man with an un-Johnsonian gift for
contentment, for enjoying life without complication. Johnson and Edwards met
again on a Good Friday almost half a century later, on April 17, 1778, when Johnson
and Boswell went to services at St. Clement’s. In his essay “A Philosopher That
Failed” (A Little of Everything,
1912), E.V. Lucas recounts their one-hour reunion, documented by Boswell in the
Life, saying it gave Edwards “time to
make his one deathless remark. By virtue of that remark he lives, and will
live.”

Boswell
assures us it was “a delightful day” and Lucas makes the point that when
Edwards woke that morning and “donned his grey clothes and his curly wig,” he
had no way of knowing he was about to be immortalized. Johnson did not
recognize him. Lucas calls Edwards “a talkative, friendly, and not easily
daunted man,” who promptly started a conversation with the famous pair,
unintimidated by Johnson’s eminence. Boswell says Edwards “accosted [him] with
familiar confidence.” At Johnson’s house, Boswell reports Edwards saying of
their days at Pembroke:

“Sir,
you would not let us say prodigious
at college. For even then, Sir (turning to me), he was delicate in language,
and we all feared him.”

Later,
after Edwards has departed, Johnson tells Boswell: “Sir, they respected me for
my literature, and yet it was not great but by comparison. Sir, it is amazing
how little literature there is in the world.” Boswell refers to Edwards’
“delightful bluntness.” We know this sort of bluff fellow, innocently
forthright and plain-speaking. He tells Johnson he regrets not studying longer
and becoming a parson, and Johnson counters that the life of a parson is not as
easy as it might appear. “I would rather have Chancery suits upon my hands than
the cure of souls.” Johnson recalls drinking ale with Edwards and sharing lines
of poetry. In reply, Edwards utters his “deathless remark”: “You are a philosopher,
Dr. Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know
how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.” Boswell observes:

“Mr.
Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mr. Courtenay, Mr. Malone, and, indeed, all the
eminent men to who I have mentioned this, have thought it an exquisite trait of
character. The truth is, that philosophy, like religion, is too generally
supposed to be hard and severe, at least so grave so as to exclude all gaiety.”

Rather
disappointingly, Boswell never reports Johnson’s reaction to Edwards’ remark.
The conversation moves on to marriage, drinking and eating. Johnson expressed
indifference to eating supper and Edwards replies, “For my part, now, I
consider supper as a turnpike through which one must pass in order to get to
bed.”

Boswell
might have made fun of Edwards for his apparent simplicity and refusal to put
on air. To his credit, he refrained, at least in his book, from ridiculing the
solicitor. Johnson is stung by Edwards’ parting reference to their ages
(Johnson is sixty-nine years old), and Boswell calls his old school fellow “a
weak man.” Johnson agrees and says, rather unfairly, “Yes, here is a man who
has passed through life without experience,” but adds, “yet I would rather have
him with me than a more sensible man who will not talk readily. This man is
always willing to say what he has to say.”

Lucas
chides Johnson and Boswell for their assessment of Edwards. Perhaps he was
unimaginative, complacent and unsophisticated. But his remark about “cheerfulness
always breaking in” is a priceless reproach to the proudly miserable, those who smugly
wear unhappiness like a colorful ribbon. Lucas has the last word: “Edwards
was a strong man – strong in his cheerfulness and his transparency.”

2 comments:

"Do your best. You cannot do more. And be cheerful. Be content with yourself. Because others will not prop you up or at most only for a short time (then you will become burdensome to them). Help yourself and help others with all your strength. And at the same time be cheerful."

The phrase of Edwards has found its way into pop culture via Leonard Cohen, who gets the provenance quite wrong:

The troubadour of gloom continues: "I think those descriptions of me are quite inappropriate to the gravity of the predicament that faces us all. I've always been free from hope. It's never been one of my great solaces. I feel that more and more we're invited to make ourselves strong and cheerful." This graduate of McGill University adds: "I think that it was Ben Jonson who said, I have studied all the theologies and all the philosophies, but cheerfulness keeps breaking through."

From "The Joking Troubadour of Gloom," Daily Telegraph, April 26, 1993.